Some stories
October 15, 2023•413 words
I haven't posted recently so here's three recent stories:
I went to a bagel shop in Dresden called Bagels Dresden. The shop had great reviews and many of them mentioned the owner as one of the reasons they loved the shop. I met the owner when I walked in and he made me a very good bagel. While I was eating he told me the tragic tale of how he came to operate the shop. All his life he had wanted to be an economist for the government. He was most of the way through school and had an internship with the department of finance already when his friend, who was a restauranteur, asked him back a loan for a new bagel shop he was opening. Within several months, his friend's restaurant business had completely collapsed and the responsibility for the bagel business now fell to the man I was talking to. It's been twenty years since then and he is still the owner and sole employee of Bagels Dresden. The shop is popular but he tells me that he sometimes still wishes he could just work for the government.
In Dresden there was a guy who decided last minute he would go to Prague. I suggested he try Flix Bus as that's the service I was using. He booked the bus for the evening and showed up at his stop 15 minutes early as suggested. I get a text from him that his bus is arriving soon. Three hours later, I'm sitting in a coffee shop in prague to avoid the pouring rain and I get a call from him. He tells me that his bus never showed up and he's been waiting in the rain for two and a half hours. Apparently, the most recent update from Flix Bus estimated that the bus would be there in another 30 minutes. He did not wait 30 minutes and went back into town for another (hopefully dry) night in Dresden.
There was a German guy at my hostel who was really bad at vape tricks but was so determined to do them he wasn't breathing between attempts and threw up on himself. He had been bragging earlier in the night about how he had only thrown up from alcohol once so now we wondered if it was common for him to asphyxiate it out of him before the alcohol could do it. For the vape trick, he nailed it on the subsequent attempt.